On Monday, Tisha B’Av, the holiday that commemorates the tragedies of Jewish history, thousands of soldiers and policemen drawn from units across Israel finally received the detailed disengagement instructions their commanders had distributed. Massed in makeshift camps near Gaza, they pored over the pocket-size handbook covering every element of the operation, from how to respond to settler threats to how to calm a hysterical child. “It’s good to see things in writing like this,” said Dubi, an Air Force officer, wiping a layer of dust off the bright-green cover. “It makes everything feel a little less chaotic.”

In Gaza, the remaining residents of the Gush Katif settlement bloc were getting some last-minute instructions of their own. Over the weekend, the Yesha Council of settler leaders announced their final desperate effort to thwart disengagement by blocking convoys carrying soldiers and policemen into Gush Katif, and told protesters to head for southern towns like Sederot and Ofakim. On Monday, new leaflets signed by several prominent West Bank rabbis advised those still inside Gaza, especially those there illegally, to “hamper and prevent the movement of the security forces on the roads,” though it urged them to resist without violence.

But the latest settler blockade wasn’t enough to halt the disengagement countdown. As Tisha B’Av ended, and with it more than three decades of government-sanctioned Israeli residence in this coastal strip captured by Israel after the 1967 war, authorities responded to the Yesha blockade threat by setting up roadblocks on all Israel’s southbound highways in the western Negev, starting at the Ashkelon junction. Later that evening, the last civilian car passed into Gaza through the Kissufim crossing. At midnight, every Israeli left in Gush Katif was officially breaking the law. Soon after, the first buses and ambulances carrying thousands of bleary-eyed troops rolled into Gaza.

Most of the northern settlements are empty now. Many of the rest are little more than ghost towns; soldiers have started marking abandoned homes with an “X” inside a circle. At least three of every five settlers have already left the coastal strip, or agreed to leave by Wednesday morning. It may be a matter of pocketbook over principle: The government has set aside more than $870 million to fund the Gaza evacuation, and those who leave before Wednesday will be fully compensated for their property. For those who remain, that offer drops by 30 percent. And thousands of residents have already made that choice, especially in the religious settlements of Gush Katif. Some say they are simply looking to make a statement by lingering as long as possible; others are vowing to actively resist their eviction.

As dawn arrived Monday and troops reached their destinations, settler frustration showed throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Shortly after the deadline hit, riots were reported in Neve Dekalim; as soldiers arrived to deliver the government’s official 48-hour eviction notice, settlers inside blockaded the entrance with piles of dumpsters and wire and set tires afire. Troops haven’t approached the five settlements expected to provide the fiercest resistance: the religious communities of Kfar Darom, Atzmona, Dugit, Netzarim and Katif, who negotiated their way out of a Monday meeting. The first time settler and soldier will come face-to-face in these communities is when actual eviction operations begin on Wednesday.

When they do meet, the soldiers’ plan of action has been scripted in painstaking detail. First comes the knock on the door, and careful negotiation by a team leader. If they can’t talk the occupants out, teams of four soldiers are assigned to enter the home and carry each settler to a bus waiting to take them back across the Green Line. The teams are divided by gender and size, from some male teams assigned the heaviest men to female teams handling women and small children. The soldiers have been trained to expect a sustained verbal assault, and a certain amount of physical abuse. The settlers are dealing with emotional trauma, said IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz, and during the beginning of this week, “we [the IDF] are there to take it, and not to dish it out.”

Technically, once a house is cleared, it becomes government property, with just a few politically considered restrictions on use. But no matter what, most soldiers insist they won’t be able to stay in the home of someone they’ve just evicted. “If I have to, I’ll make myself comfortable on one of their nice green lawns right outside. I couldn’t stay under the roof of someone I kicked out, I’d have nightmares,” said a young Air Force captain.

The fiercest resistance so far isn’t necessarily coming from Gaza settlers themselves, but from anti-disengagement infiltrators who’ve slipped across the border illegally all summer; by the deadline, their numbers had climbed to as high as 5,000, and border police have arrested hundreds more still trying to make it across, including some posing as television crews, and others stowing away in moving vans arriving to carry residents in the other direction. (From Monday night through Tuesday alone, authorities arrested more than 800 right-wing protesters.) It’s a mixed group that includes yeshiva students, young families from other, still-legal settlements, and some sympathetic Americans (like former New York Rep. Dov Hikind and Helen Freedman, executive director of Americans for a Safe Israel, both of whom arrived this week). It’s the teenagers dubbed the “hilltop youth” who worry authorities the most: groups of male religious students and others who’ve set up camp in tents or empty buildings and pledged to remain for a final showdown with the IDF.

For all of them, it’s zero hour. Some are taking their stand on religious principle, claiming that all of the biblical land of Eretz Israel belongs to the Jews. Others subscribe to a fatalistic domino theory, citing Sharon’s refusal to rule out further territorial concessions in the West Bank: today Netzarim, tomorrow Netanya. In his speech to the nation Monday night, Sharon mourned the death of the settler dream, saying he had hoped Israel would be able to hold on to Netzarim and Kfar Darom “forever. But that is impossible.” He added that the withdrawal offered Israel a new chance for peace, and threatened the Palestinians with a “harsher than ever” response to any future terror atacks. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a man more associated with the olive branch, spent the day stressing the security rewards of the operation. “You are saving Israel,” he told troops guarding the now-closed Kissufim crossing. The government is gambling that disengagement will deliver peace and security. Right-wing opponents like Benjamin Netanyahu, who left Sharon’s government in protest, insist that it will bring neither.

For Sharon and Israel, the beginning of the disengagement process marks the end of a remarkable journey. In a matter of months, the once unthinkable has become the undeniable. Israeli commentators have made a national pastime speculating on Sharon’s motivations, with right-wing columnists pointing darkly to his legal troubles, now largely forgotten, while what’s left of the Israeli left argues that Sharon clearly intends to trade Gaza for the real prize, continued Israeli control of the West Bank and Jerusalem. What is sure is that as with President Bush and Iraq, one man’s vision has single-handedly altered the foreign policy of a nation. Nobody seems sure what comes next: not Sharon, not the Israeli public, and certainly not Palestinians, who spent the week alternating between overwhelming elation and borderline paranoia. In a historic first, P.A. security forces have coordinated with their Israeli counterparts to prevent extremists on either side from derailing disengagement, but it is uncertain how long the calm will last.

Looking down the road, many suspect the Gaza withdrawal, along with the planned evacuation of four isolated Jewish settlements in the northern West Bank, marks the beginning and the end of Israeli territorial concessions to a future Palestinian state. If so, that will put Sharon on a collision course with the Palestinians, one that the Gaza drama has only temporarily obscured. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas reiterated his people’s long-standing position when he described Gaza disengagement as the first step to the eventual hand-over of all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This position, which envisions Israel returning more or less to its pre-June 1967 borders, has been the consensus one held by the international community and, until recently, the U.S. But Sharon has stated that he has no intention of withdrawing from the large settlement blocs in the West Bank or of allowing the division of Jerusalem. The only player that can break this logjam is the United States, Israel’s indispensable ally. In a break with U.S. policy, in April 2004 President Bush gave his de facto blessing to the large settlement blocs, although his aides have since backtracked slightly. No one knows what the U.S. will do when crunch time in the West Bank comes.

While these issues waited on the horizon, Israel this week had the air of a nation tired of dwelling on disengagement. After a slight dip earlier this summer, polls show support for disengagement has been rising steadily. Organizers hoped to bring 20,000 to an anti-pullout protest Monday; instead, just a few hundred showed up. On an army bus near Gaza, troops rode in silence and listened to the radio as an emotional caller told one host “we are through using troops as human shields” to keep 9,000 Gaza settlers from coming into contact with the 1.3 million Palestinians that surround them.

All summer, activists have alternated between berating troops for their involvement and trying to guilt-trip them into defying orders. At an anti-withdrawal protest several weeks ago near the border town of Ofakim, sweet-faced children offered gifts of candy to troops acting as a living barrier between rally attendees and Gush Katif. “We love you, soldiers! We love you, policemen!” they chanted over and over, as their parents urged the officers to disobey their commanders. “God will hold you responsible for what you do here,” said one woman sternly, as she balanced a big-eyed child on her hip. “This is an evil order. You do not have to follow it.”

But despite harsh settler rhetoric, and the IDF’s fears, it’s possible even the most hardcore withdrawal opponents may not have the appetite for a death match over Gaza. So far, despite threats and the occasional confrontation, the army hasn’t had to activate “zero ring,” the Special Forces units who’ve been trained to intervene if eviction efforts turn violent. (The other six “rings” of security are already in place: soldiers and policemen responsible for sealing the border, holding the roads, standing guard in case of Hamas attacks.) Instead, stories of emotional reunions between settlers and units that have already arrived are filtering back to troops tensely awaiting their first ride into Gush Katif: between soldiers and commanding officers, nephews and uncles, high school classmates. “It is OK to cry with them,” the IDF chief of staff told brigade commanders.

For the soldiers of Ofek, the unit I’ve been embedded with for the past month, the waiting has turned hellish. For the first few weeks of training, most of the grumbling was directed at the living conditions in Re’im Bet, a few threadbare canvas tents perched on a barren patch of ground near Gaza. The Negev sun was overpowering in cloudless skies. When the air did move, it swept along clouds of dust that coated every available surface, and invariably made it through several layers of Saran Wrap into my computer keyboard. Every time I took off my shoes, I poured out a small pile of dirt; I could feel sand gritting between my teeth when I spoke. On some exercises, troops slept out in the field under open skies, faces and arms covered against flea bites, and avoided midnight bathroom runs because of snake scares.

But as Aug. 15 drew closer, the psychological burden of “Operation Helping Hand to Our Brothers” became the greatest source of angst. “Standing before you is a difficult mission,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told soldiers during his address to the nation Monday night. “Not an enemy, but brothers and sisters.” It’s a tough task for troops trained to fight. Many weren’t yet born during the rancorous evacuation of Yamit settlement in Sinai in 1982, and express discomfort with an assignment that involves ceding ground, not defending it.

On deadline day, as a few units headed into Gaza to hand out eviction notices, many troops wandered the camp in aimless packs, or sat in small groups cleaning and recleaning the guns they won’t be allowed to use on this mission. Cellphone messages from other units sent rumors sweeping the base. To break the tension, one skinny soldier abruptly broke into a loud, ironic chorus of “David, Melech Israel” (David, King of Israel), a settler favorite. Some of his friends yelled back anti-disengagement slogans by way of a sarcastic comeback; other troops napping on the slightly shaded ground next to a nearby tent didn’t even crack an eyelid. “It would be nice to know for sure where they’re sending us. There’s always the chance you’ll run into someone you know,” said a Navy lieutenant assigned to the operation. He stood on the edge of camp, squinting into the sun, and watched more military traffic drift toward Gaza. “But I’m just ready to finally start already. Whether you agree with this or not, I think everybody just wants it over as fast as possible.”

Now these four little letters are absolutely guaranteed to raise the Bush administration’s collective blood pressure as it tries to get an energy bill through Congress. But the MTBE threat the administration is most concerned with isn’t environmental; it’s political. Once before, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s dogged determination to protect MTBE producers from legal jeopardy dragged the administration’s entire energy plan down to defeat. And he’s at it again.

A lot has changed since late 2003, the last time the Bush energy bill failed to make it through Congress. Gas prices have hit new highs — prices have soared 80 percent since Bush first introduced his energy plan — and the president’s approval ratings have slid to new lows. A Gallup Poll earlier this month found that more Americans think the federal government needs to act immediately to lower gas prices (44 percent) than move on Social Security (37 percent), the president’s top priority. No wonder the president feels a new urgency on energy legislation: “I wish I could simply wave a magic wand and lower gas prices tomorrow,” Bush said on Wednesday.

The political sands may be shifting for Bush, but the one Washington constant is still Tom DeLay. For all the charges he’s faced, DeLay has never been accused of a lack of consistency. Last week, he managed to add the same lawsuit-immunity provision to the House energy bill that torpedoed the energy bill’s Senate chances last time around. And Tuesday night, he rebuffed the final frantic Democratic efforts to separate the measure from the main energy legislation, expected to pass the House as soon as Thursday.

But while DeLay’s allegiance to MTBE producers may not have changed, the atmosphere around him has been undeniably transformed in recent months — even Republicans on the House Ethics Committee now say they are ready for an investigation. DeLay’s hardly the only big-time Republican to back MTBE liability immunity — House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Joe Barton, who’s received around $750,000 from energy interests over the past decade, has also been a strong proponent of the measure — but since last week’s power play, the majority leader has become the public face of MTBE legal immunity, to the delight of Democrats and environmental groups.

Now that every move of the man from Sugar Land comes under a white-hot media spotlight, reporters have predictably spent the past few days scrutinizing the congressman’s tangle of ties to oil companies and others who’d be spared legal jeopardy thanks to the provision. (“DeLay at Center of the Energy Debate” read one recent AP headline.) The energy bill’s foes are scrambling to take advantage of the new reality around the majority leader. It’s an association that pains the White House, but “to the public, this is becoming Tom DeLay’s bill,” admits a grim GOP congressional staffer.

“Last time, we were out front in identifying MTBE very aggressively as DeLay’s measure. And we had some success,” says Environmental Working Group Action Fund president Ken Cook. “The difference now is, the rest of the context is filled in: his junkets, the other corruption allegations.” He adds, “There’s kind of an odor around him this time, a willingness to believe things about Mr. DeLay and the lengths to which he’s willing to go that is much stronger than was there before.”

Democrats on the Hill predict the majority leader’s woes may take a toll on the measure’s long-term prospects. “He’s still powerful, but people may not be as willing to take the hit for him the way they were two years ago,” says a Democratic House committee staffer familiar with the legislation. “We’re not talking fringe groups bringing these lawsuits here; we’re talking the state of New Hampshire. Now people have to think: ‘Am I willing to overlook a case by my school board, by the local water supplier, for Tom DeLay?’ Some members still are, but it’s becoming a harder sell.”

And whether the DeLay controversy will further damage the bill’s chances in the Senate, where the MTBE measure sank the bill last time, remains a very real question. Several Northeast Republicans, particularly New England senators such as John Sununu and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire (where MTBE was an issue during last year’s presidential primary) have already signaled their unwillingness to support any measure that includes MTBE liability protection when the Senate takes up the measure next month. And Senate Energy Committee chairman Pete Domenici has made it clear the House will have to find a compromise on the issue, or the bill won’t survive.

Of course, MTBE and Tom DeLay are hardly the only issues dogging the president’s energy legislation. A provision inserted into the bill’s “miscellaneous” section could mean the most drastic Clean Air Act changes since his father’s administration. The measure, a favorite of groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, would free states from Clean Air Act requirements if some of their pollution comes from other heavily polluted areas located “upwind” until those areas had cleaned up their act. Outraged Democrats point out that nearly every state is “downwind” from somewhere else, and say this amounts to a repeal of federal air pollution requirements.

Meanwhile, the measure’s growing tally of tax breaks for energy producers — introduced at a time of sky-high oil prices — is drawing scrutiny from press and politicians both. A new report by Taxpayers for Common Sense, one of several fiscal watchdog groups to announce their opposition to the energy bill this week, found the measure’s cost this session had mushroomed by $35 billion in the three weeks since it was introduced, to the tune of a staggering $88.9 billion in tax breaks and industry subsidies over the next decade.

So the options for the GOP right now range from tough to tougher. Despite its lack of short-term solutions, the Bush energy bill is the Republican Party’s sole proffered fix for high gas prices and other energy woes — the political consequences of failing to pass it are unthinkable. But so is the impact, given the current climate, of creating legal immunity for an industry with a growing constituency of critics, using a provision now surrounded with an aura of corruption, or at least the perception of corruption.

Call it the mainstreaming of MTBE bashing: According to the most recent tallies, more than 20 million people in 112 congressional districts have been affected by MTBE-polluted drinking water — the count of communities affected has risen by by more than 20 percent over the past two years — and in 26 of those districts, municipalities have taken to the courts to force oil companies to fix the problem. More suits are on the way — representing a lot of potentially angry voters.

The White House faces its own set of unappetizing options. Passing the energy bill remains priority No. 1 in the face of growing public pressure. But now the administration faces the very real prospect that a win on the energy bill could indirectly taint them with fallout from the DeLay mess.

What explains the Hammer’s die-hard loyalty to liability immunity for MTBE? He’s long stood up for the chemical industry out of conservative principle, and most MTBE manufacturers are Texas-based. But DeLay’s detractors point to another motive closer to the bottom line: A recent Public Citizen tally of five years of contributions to DeLay’s legal defense fund found that $107,000 came from energy and natural resources companies. His political action committee has been the recipient of even greater industry largesse; according to the Center for Responsive Politics, oil and gas companies, many of whom stand to benefit from the MTBE immunity provision, have donated more than $300,000 over the last three election cycles.

Last year, DeLay drew a rebuke from the Ethics Committee because he “at a minimum, created the appearance that donors were being provided with special access … regarding the then-pending energy legislation.” But it appears the congressman, never one to put much stock in appearances, hasn’t yet taken that message to heart. Huntsman Corp., one of the nation’s largest MTBE producers, has demonstrated a surge in DeLay-directed generosity over the past few months. Jon M. Huntsman Sr., Huntsman Corp., the Huntsman PAC and company CEO Peter Huntsman all gave the maximum contribution to the DeLay’s legal defense fund in the last quarter of 2004; the $20,000 total put them in the top tier of his supporters. (And Huntsman’s loyalty to DeLay doesn’t stop there: Last January, the company hired the congressman’s former deputy chief of staff, Tony Rudy, along with two of his colleagues from the Washington firm Alexander Strategies, to round out their formidable energy bill lobbying team.)

Besides protecting companies from the spate of MTBE-related lawsuits filed since late 2003, the House bill calls for phasing out the additive’s use over a nine-year stretch. The increasingly handout-loaded bill would also give MTBE producers a $2 billion golden parachute to help with industry transition costs. Democrats are urging a faster phaseout plan that would end the additive’s use by the end of the decade, and they are criticizing the GOP’s generosity. “These [Republican] provisions represent a direct assault on the nation’s safe drinking-water supply,” a frustrated John Dingell, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told reporters. “MTBE producers have known for years that MTBE was a problem. They should not be asking the taxpayers to now pay for cleanup or for [a] corporate handout.”

The GOP is clearly nervous about how the measure will play outside the Beltway. Anticipating the energy bill’s House passage this week, Republican leadership launched a communications strategy on Tuesday designed to boost public support for the measure despite the lack of an immediate impact at the pump — and to try to shift attention from the swarm of ethical questions surrounding Tom DeLay. The working idea, borrowed from the Bush administration, is to circumvent the national media, with its fixation on DeLay’s corporate connections, in favor of local outlets. Republican representatives planned to blanket local airwaves using messages specifically developed for their region. (For instance: The winter-weary, blackout-wary Northeast is set to hear about home-heating cost assistance and an overhaul of the national power grid.)

Meanwhile, the White House’s massive push for the energy plan has moved into high gear. The president devoted his radio address last Saturday to pressing the point, and he followed up a recent Hill lobbying visit by Energy Secretary Sam Bodman with scheduled meetings of his own yesterday with the chairmen of the House and Senate committees dealing with the bill. In a speech on Wednesday, he repeated his call for speedy passage. So far, the administration has kept largely mum on its views of both the MTBE provision and Tom DeLay’s recent actions. As history draws closer to repeating itself, that may change, though success is far from certain; last time, White House calls for an MTBE compromise drew a public rebuff from the majority leader. (“We see no need for a giveaway to trial lawyers,” sneered a DeLay spokesman shortly before the energy bill went down in flames.)

“I think if it comes down to having an energy bill or MTBE, the White House will speak out,” says an organizer for a major environmental group actively opposing the legislation. “So the question is, does the cloud surrounding him, combined with the substance of this provision, cause Bush to speak out? The clearer it becomes that you can’t have this liability shield and the bill both — the question then is, not will the administration speak out publicly, but are they ready to pull out all the stops?”

Privately, even some GOP representatives who publicly support the measure have begun telling environmental lobbyists to keep the spotlight on Tom DeLay and what they view as the bill’s flaws, particularly the MTBE provision. “What’s ironic is, the White House has almost everything it wants in this bill, including ANWR. They did their best to strip it down to its bare essence, to ensure passage. Now this comes up,” says Cook, of the Environmental Working Group Action Fund. “But Tom DeLay doesn’t answer to anyone but himself.”